Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

(floreal.tech)

94 points | by Vosporos 5 hours ago ago

17 comments

  • shevy-java 2 minutes ago ago

    Are people still using gtk?

    I started to learn it back then via ruby-gtk2. It was not the best experience but I learned several key things pertaining to widgets and the UI. Then came gtk3; it was in some ways worse than GTK2, but it also brought a few improvements such as the partial CSS support. I always miss that when I use e. g. wxwidget.

    Then came GTK4 though and things changed. Tons of old things broke or no longer worked. Simple things such as main_window_widget.move(0, 0) for top-left positioning (I added an alias to this, .top_left in ruby and that worked nicely); there are work-arounds to get the old behaviour, but this is just one example of so many more things that were eliminated. GTK4 is a GNOMEy-toolkit and GTK5 will be even worse since it will be wayland-only.

    "Interacting" with the GNOMEy-GTK devs is a total waste of time and I am hardly the only one who had that experience. For GNOMEys it may be a useful platform, but GTK no longer is a general toolkit really, despite claims by the current GTK devs otherwise. Why would we non-GNOMEys want to keep GTK on life support? There really needs to be a toolkit that can work in a much more de-centralized way. Sadly I also don't have a good idea here, since funding is an issue and GUIs seem to have taken a huge hit ever since the world wide web became dominating.

  • seba_dos1 3 hours ago ago

    Replace `backdrop-filter` on `.backdrop::after` with `filter` on `.backdrop picture` for a free scrolling performance boost.

    • nh2 2 hours ago ago

      Indeed the scrolling performance is awful, makes reading it less enjoyable, especially when the topic is GUIs!

    • grimgrin 28 minutes ago ago

      desktop and mobile browsers have a reader mode icon you can click. it is useful for 1) this 2) website blocking fully loaded content with some paywall popup 3) and more!

      click it for a better time

  • pluc an hour ago ago

    > import GI.Awd qualified as Adw

    please tell me that's a typo

  • birchcove 3 hours ago ago

    i've been writing Haskell GUIs for a few years and mostly stick to react-banana or reflex because wiring up gtk-gi signals manually gets messy fast. The Elm architecture pattern here looks clean on paper but I'm curious how you handle async events from the widget tree without ending up in callback hell. Did you end up wrapping all GI callbacks in a channel that feeds into your update loop?

    • freedomben 22 minutes ago ago

      Is Haskell in this case just binding a local HTTP port that users then hit with the browser? Or is it like a Tauri/Electron type of thing?

  • beanjuiceII 2 hours ago ago

    bro takes 2 years to make a todo list

  • drnick1 2 hours ago ago

    Just keep in mind that some people like me avoid Haskell and the huge package mess it causes on Linux. Pandoc is infamous for that. Just stick to C++.

    • kccqzy 41 minutes ago ago

      Does your distro not statically link Haskell libraries the way it’s meant to? Installing pandoc only requires libgmp.

    • Vosporos 2 hours ago ago

      That is entirely your distribution's fault. ArchLinux has a user-hostile packaging approach which I do not experience in Fedora.

      • klez an hour ago ago

        What does Arch do in particular to cause a mess? It's been a hot minute since I last used it and surely didn't use pandoc back then.

        • nimih 10 minutes ago ago

          Haskell packages in arch are dynamically, rather than statically, linked, which pulls in a large amount of transitive dependencies (reportedly in the neighborhood of a gigabyte). The maintainer has a pretty reasonable (to my eyes) explanation[1] as to why this is the case, but admittedly if I were an arch user I'd probably find it a bit annoying.

          [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9emwtu/comment/e5qss...

        • spider-mario 14 minutes ago ago

          They build and link all Haskell libraries dynamically.

      • Ambolia 2 hours ago ago

        I completely avoid any haskell package in Arch and just build it with Stack, it's usually simple.